Filled with startling portraits of Africa’s raw and tragic beauty, this first retrospective of Peter Hugo’s award-winning work collects the most important images from the photographer’s career to date.

Pieter Hugo has been documenting his native continent of Africa since his late teens. An autodidact, he was eventually drawn to portraiture, an interest that culminated with his hugelypopular book, The Hyena and Other Men. Since that book, Hugo has continued to earn high praise while testing the limits of the traditional portrait. As Aperture magazine observes, “Hugo maneuvers through the muddy waters of political engagement, documentary responsibility, and the relationship of these to his own aesthetic.” In the books Nollywood and Permanent Error he suffuses a journalist’s perspective and a voyeur’s theatricality into images of Africa’s people and environment. This retrospective volume collects photographs from each of his earlier series as well as portraits and landscapes that have never been shown or published before. Essays by three esteemed photographic critics contextualize Hugo’s career within the realm of contemporary photography. Full-page color illustrations highlight Hugo’s extraordinary talent for teasing out the subtleties in otherwise stark images.